


A Case Study

by crystalsoulslayer



Category: Class (TV 2016)
Genre: Accidental Communist Recruiting, Cultural Differences, Fully-Functional Footnotes, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 15:57:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8807113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crystalsoulslayer/pseuds/crystalsoulslayer
Summary: Charlie Smith does not understand money, and is therefore not allowed to go shopping. Here, we examine the consequences of him attempting to do so.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FernDavant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FernDavant/gifts).



> This story contains humorous footnotes. Click one to be taken to the footnotes; click its number to return to the line where the footnote is found. And then take a moment to appreciate that AO3 supports this feature, because it's awesome.

Charlie is not permitted to shop.

Matteusz, upon discovering this, was aghast, and immediately went downstairs to confront Quill about it. He insisted, even though Charlie told him that he didn’t care1.

"Charlie might need something, and you might not be there!"

"You can get it."

"What if _I'm_ not here?"

"He can wait."

"What if is important? Very important? Like he is hurt, and needs bandages?"

"If he's hurt, the ahn will cause a fuss, and I'll have no choice but to run to his aid2. Anyway, we have bandages here, and running into a store bleeding will attract more attention than he needs to attract, regardless."

"Why is this a problem with you? You don't want him to have independence?"

"Oh, I'd like to forcibly render him independent in a number of ways. Independent from his vital signs, for instance. Tell you what. I'll give you some money, Matteusz. Take Charlie to the shops tomorrow. Get whatever you like, and let him try first."

Matteusz took him to the shops. Charlie is still not allowed to go shopping. Matteusz has never brought it up again.

 

If one were to summarize Charlie's understanding of money, one could do it with the words, "Charlie understands money in the same sense that a state-of-the-art chess computer understands reality television."

Which is to say that he does not understand it, and he almost certainly never will. It does _not_ , however, mean that he is stupid. He's simply never been programmed to understand it, and the concept is not easily transferrable because it lies so completely outside of his frame of reference.

To illustrate the repercussions this has for his ability to function in a capitalist society, we’ll examine the events surrounding his attempt to buy a candy bar.

 

This candy bar3 had been mentioned by a fellow student in the context of being “an orgasm wrapped in cellophane,” and Charlie, passing a small corner shop on his way back to the flat, decided to be adventurous and try one. Entering the shop is easy, as is wandering around until he finds what he is looking for. Choosing from a selection of items is a task he also has experience with; he finds the brand he is looking for and picks it up.

Now, he has the candy bar. He got it in a shop. He has examined the labeling carefully, ensuring it's the one he heard about. What happens next? He leaves with it, apparently. (There may be an intermediate stage; he's not sure.)

"Oi, son. Going to pay for that, are you?"

Ah, yes. There _is_ an intermediate stage. "Yes, of course. Er. How, er, what is… required?"

"Pardon?"

"What do I do?"

The cashier studies Charlie carefully. He's not producing any unusual excretions, not swaying or slurring, not displaying any signs of intoxication from what he can tell. Might be a nutter. Let's find out. "You pay for it," the cashier says.

"Er. Yes. How do I do that?"

"With money."

"Money."

"Yes. Do you have cash? Bits of paper, with words and numbers and faces on them."

"Oh! No, I haven't got anything like that."

"Well, then, you'll need to use a card, won't you?"

Charlie frowns, thinking. A card. He's heard that term used before. They are closely-guarded pieces of property. Another student once said that his "mum's card" was the subject of "identity theft."

"Do you mean my school ID?" Charlie asks, puzzled.

The cashier, at this point, is so sufficiently bewildered by this prospective customer's absolute ignorance that he can no longer speculate about its cause, and has to resort to answering the question. "No, mate, I mean a _credit_ card. If you hand it to me, I can enter it in the computer, and you get your candy bar."

Charlie thinks he might know what the cashier is referring to. He retrieves it from his wallet, approaches the counter, and hands the card to the cashier.

The cashier studies it in silence for a long moment. He then studies Charlie, now once again wondering whether this boy is high, stupid, or insane. This close, the cashier can check more thoroughly. His eyes look fine, not bloodshot or watery, pupils aren't too big or too small. Still no sign he's sweating or pissing himself. He clearly knows where he is, and the meaning of his words are clear. He's not muttering, not twitching, not acting shifty. The extended eye contact results in a nervous smile, but not the sort that suggests an ulterior motive. It's the kind of nervous smile given by someone who has shown up in the wrong classroom by accident, and is bluffing their way through the lesson to avoid revealing that they've made a mistake.4

The card this boy has provided is not a credit card. It’s a rewards card from a cinema – you can earn discounts on tickets by having them scan the barcode on it every time you get popcorn or drinks.

“This is… er. This is for the cinema. You can’t use it here.” And it doesn’t really work as money even at the cinema, and why would he think otherwise? But, the cashier supposes, from a certain perspective, it does make a certain amount of sense. A card that is processed by computer when one purchases small food items. If you had never heard of a credit card before, that might sound perfect.

“Oh. Well, er. Is that sort of what they look like, though? I’ve seen a few. It’s at least the right size, I’m quite sure,” the boy says uncertainly. He had pocketed his wallet when he handed the cashier the cinema card, and he fumbles for it again.

The implications of a boy this age never having heard of a credit card are starting to occur to the cashier. How could he not have heard of a credit card in eighteen years? And the way he asked _how to pay for something_. You can’t fake that level of benign ignorance. Internally, the cashier is beginning to panic. He visited the White Cliffs of Dover once, as a kid. He saw the long drop from sure footing to the beach, and had the sudden unshakeable feeling that gravity itself was trying to pull him over the edge. He is now experiencing the mental equivalent of that feeling.

“Is this it?” asks Charlie.

The cashier heaves a sigh of relief. “Yes. That’s a credit card.” He smiles, and Charlie smiles, and the cashier gives a little laugh. Perhaps he’s recording this for YouTube, as a social experiment or something. The White Cliffs of Dover recede from his mind.

The cashier hands him the cinema card back, takes the credit card, and clicks around in the point-of-sale software. Charlie is halfway to the door by the time the cashier has the computer ready to accept the transaction.

“Where are you going?”

“Oh, er, you have the card, so you can scan it in the computer now, right?”

“Yes, but I don’t keep it,” the cashier says. The White Cliffs of Dover are encroaching once again, rumbling towards him like great stone glaciers, ready to pull his concept of the world free of its stable footing. “I just charge it a pound eleven, and then I give it back to you.”

“A pound eleven?”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t weigh that much, surely.”

“Er. That’s not, er. It’s not the weight kind of pound, it’s the currency pound. That’s what we use in Britain.” He watches the boy’s face. There is no sign of understanding. “You know, like dollars or pesos or yen. You know.”

He does _not_ know. From what the cashier can tell, Charlie has not heard any of those three words before in his life. Even “currency” seems like a recent addition to his vocabulary. 5 His expression remains the same, the slight frown of confusion, and his eyes – his eyes are what really do it, they’re troubled and utterly uncomprehending.

“The currency pound.”

“Yeah, currency.”

“What does currency measure, if not weight?”

“It’s a measure of… of value.” Even as he says it, the cashier realizes how absurd that sounds, when you say it aloud. Currency measures value. The value of what? What is money, when you think about it?

“What kind of value? Personal value? Its usefulness?”

“No. The value, in. Er.” A phrase comes to him from his economics lessons. “Market value.” Money is… what? _It’s cash in hand_ , he thinks, uncertainly. But isn’t that just paper? “The market value is how much it costs.”

Charlie does not have a reference for costs, except in the zero-sum thought experiments he’d been led through by his tactics tutors. He rules out strategic concerns because it’s just a candy bar, but something else occurs to him. “Does it take an emotional toll of some kind? I have noticed that discussion of money can make some people very upset.”

It’s not paper, though, money. Some kind of cloth, technically. But it represents something greater. “No. It’s the cost. That’s all. Just the cost.” What does it represent? The GBP doesn’t use the gold standard, and he’s quite sure that almost no one does anymore. And anyway, if it did represent gold, what’s so special about gold? The candy bar is probably worth more to this kid right now than its own weight in gold. What would Charlie do with a gold bar, if he had one?6 What would _he_ do?

The cashier has quite forgotten how, exactly, he came to this point in his thought process. Waves break on the beach beneath the White Cliffs of Dover.

“But what is the cost? What is being lost?” Charlie asks, serene in his confusion.7

_Money is being lost,_ the cashier thinks. _But what does that mean? What do I work sixty hours a week for? Money is just an idea. I work and I work, and I am given a concept in return. We all agree to use money, but why? We talk about money like it’s meant to make things fair, but if it were fair, why don’t we all get paid the same? Why are my sixty hours worth so much less than some banker’s thirty? At least I am selling things that physically exist. The banker just moves bits of this concept around, and he probably does it in a chair that costs more than I make in a month._

“Are you all right?” Charlie asks the cashier, who, by this point, has been staring vacantly at him for almost a minute.

Is he? Maybe he’s the crazy one. Maybe the whole bloody _country_ is the crazy one. Maybe this teenager is fundamentally incapable of processing the most basic functions of capitalism because there is nothing to understand, because it truly does not function. The truth is that no one is free. No one ever has been. No one has ever been equal, either. Money is a disguise behind which the mechanisms of oppression have been cloaked, all this time. “I can’t afford it,” might as well mean “I wasn’t born one of the people who’s allowed to have this.”

Well, fuck that. The White Cliffs of Dover are no longer trying to pull him over the edge of understanding; instead, he sprints to them, flings himself over, gives himself to the fall.

He is not the same person who was in the store when Charlie entered. He will never be that person again.

Charlie shifts his weight nervously. “Er. Is something wrong?”

The cashier studies him for a moment. Should he say anything? No. Best not. “Nothing is wrong. Sorry about that, I’ve just… remembered something I need to do. Do you understand a bit better now?”

Charlie considers this. If he lies, the cashier might challenge him on it, and that might go badly. “No, not really. I do appreciate you trying. However, it seems this is something I’m not built for.”

Yes. Yes, that is certainly how it seems. He doubts this is the first time this adolescent has been in this situation. In fact, for a moment, the cashier gets the vague impression that several people have been made aware of this absolute and blissful ignorance. Several highly-paid, professional someones could have been giving him lessons, and it is very easy to imagine those lessons proceeding very similarly to this one, except that they took place in huge, palatial chambers.

“You know what, son? You just, you just… have that. Have that on me.” The cashier hands him back the credit card and cancels the transaction.

He’s not supposed to give things away for free, no matter how low-priced they may be. But that’s not going to matter in the long run, not to him, not even to his stingy, demanding boss.

It won’t matter to _anyone_ in the long run. Nothing like this ever will again. The cashier will see to that.

“Oh. Er. Did you do something? I still don’t know what the cost is, I’m terribly sorry –“

“No, honestly. I haven’t done anything. Don’t worry about it, alright? You just take that and go. You enjoy your candy.”

Charlie blinks dazedly, as if a camera flash has just gone off. Then he smiles brightly. It’s a handsome smile. “Thanks!” he says enthusiastically, because Matteusz has been training him to. Then he’s out the door, into the sunlight. He unwraps it as he’s walking home and takes a bite, but decides he doesn’t like this particular variety of candy bar.

He gives it to Matteusz. Matteusz likes them, apparently, and laughs heartily when Charlie tells him about how he got it. Charlie likes it when Matteusz laughs, and therefore considers the whole exercise thoroughly worthwhile.

The cashier thinks about calling his boss to let him know, but decides not to. His boss has never given him advance warning when he calls up in the middle of the night, demanding that he show up to work another six hours in addition to his regular nine, because the overnight part-timer wasn’t smiling at the customers enough and got fired on the spot. He writes a note instead, a not-terribly-professional one, indicating that he will not be returning to work.

When his shift ends and the part-timer shows up, he gives her a big smile and says, “There’s a note under the keyboard. Please make sure the boss sees it.”

“I will.”

“Cheers.”

The cashier walks out the door and into the night. He never works again; immediately after walking out, he sells nearly all of his worldly possessions, empties his bank accounts, and his movements become very difficult to track. Precisely what he is doing is unknown, but it probably involves liberating the means of production.

 

1 He doesn't enjoy it, frankly, and she seems slightly mollified by his agreement. He finds himself rather touched by Matteusz's concern, however.

2 Or, if not actually run to his aid, at least jog to it, most likely while swearing profusely.

3 The name of the candy bar has been omitted for good and entirely justifiable reasons like “copyright” and “objectivity” and “lack of relevance,” and not because _someone_ didn’t want to do even the most rudimentary of research.

4 Charlie has _almost_ done this. He did, in fact, show up at the wrong classroom by mistake, on his first day of school at Coal Hill, and he did indeed stay through the entire lesson. However, he wasn’t bluffing through it. He only realized later that it was the wrong room; at the time, he simply assumed that Oliver Cromwell was a prominent mathematician.

5 It isn’t one, actually. Charlie’s speeches often involved the term in the context of Quill currency being either “invalid tender” or “accepted, but at reduced value,” depending on the mood the economists were in that morning. Charlie has never had any idea what that means.

6 It’d be quite heavy, so he could use it to keep books open flat on his desk. He hates how the pages sometime decide to stand themselves up or blow around. Makes him lose his place while studying. Or he could give it to Matteusz, like Matteusz gave him that cinema card that already had points on it. The exchange of valuable gifts is part of courtship, and that should balance out.

7 In fact, Charlie is more than a little perturbed. The Doctor said he and Quill would speak perfect English, but Charlie is starting to wonder if something is going wrong with the translation. This is tranquility itself, however, in comparison with what is currently happening to the cashier’s entire concept of himself and the world.


End file.
